[Updated at 6:32 p.m. with response from a senior member of the Obama administration. –Ed.]

The news that Verizon is supplying a wealth of call data to the National Security Agency is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported today that a number of other tech companies are participating in a top secret data mining program for the FBI and NSA, dubbed PRISM.

The companies are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple, according to an “internal presentation” for senior NSA analysts that the Washington Post obtained. Dropbox was next on the list for the feds to tap. The program allegedly enables the feds to gather information from these companies’ servers directly. The data siphoned off includes photos, videos, e-mail, documents, audio files, and connection logs.

The program [PRISM] is subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.

We’re reaching out to the companies named in the report for comment, but we haven’t heard from all of them yet.

It now seems that Verizon monitoring just the beginning of a much bigger spying program by U.S. intelligence officers, that the Washington Post reports this has been a critical part of President Barack Obama’s daily briefing.

The ease with which the government can allegedly monitor suspected sources is chilling. “With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s ‘extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services,'” the Post reports.

“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the Post quotes a government officer as saying.

It’s quite likely, although the Post report doesn’t address this detail, that the data mining operation is connected with the construction of a massive, $2 billion high-security datacenter in Utah scheduled to open in September.

The data collected in PRISM makes up for one in seven of NSA intelligence reports, according to the obtained presentation.